Quote:
Originally Posted by RIROCKHOUND
Sure I will comment.
Trump is not Hitler.
Trump is NOT Charles Manson.
Trump is a charismatic narcissist who knows how to talk to people and sell them without saying anything (or anything true). You might say Obama had shades of this as well, he was a very good orator and connected with people in an emotional way that other candidates hadn't (some of which was probably b/c of race, others was 'hope and change'. Most good politicians probably also share similar speaking skills mentioned in the article.
Trump knows his base of the voters will stick with him, so he plays to that. Hence his 'I could shoot someone on 5th Ave' comment.
If you do not think that political scientists, sociologists and political strategists will not look to and study his campaign style and language and in some ways try to emulate it, you are mistaken. People will be studying this election for a long, long time...
From the article (my bold added)
“A charismatic leader knows how to speak to people in a way that will emotionally engage those people,” Smaller told Newsweek.
Smaller is clear that he does not believe President Donald Trump is similar to the convicted killer, or that their followers have any shared beliefs or characteristics, but he did say we can look to the current president to see how language is used to form a bond with followers.
“Our current president speaks in an emotional or affective way to large numbers of people in our country who feel a kind of alienation or disconnection from the government,” he said. “They feel very responded to and become his political base.”
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I like your analysis. It is very astute. But I don't think it goes quite far enough in the direction you are taking. That last quote you end with contains the germ for an even greater connection to the emotional and affective way Trump or Manson supposedly speak or spoke. Trump's way can be connected to the way the left, rather than the classical liberal way of the past, has spoken.
Many of us have said that Trump is throwing the left's way right back at them. He is, subliminally, the left's worst nightmare. He is that mirror reflection, in methodology, of who they are. The left has to shatter that mirror, and make him out to be some out of touch anomaly that is dangerous to our survival as a democracy. And that mirror has to be isolated from its larger connection and destroyed before that connection is realized. Before it is realized that Trump's supposed danger is synonymous to theirs.
Also telling in that last quote you cited ("a kind of alienation or disconnection from the government,”) is exactly how Trump uses that alienation in the same way that the left does. The left equates government to be separate and above the people. For the left, alienation from the government is a consequence of government not favoring the people, or some over others. So when the leftists give favors to the larger class of people who numerically control the election, “They feel very responded to and become his [the left's] political base.” Trump's political populism is all about that very thing. In classical liberalism (conservatism in its most basic sense, not Republican Progressivism) the people ARE the government. There is no separation or alienation unless the government separates itself, becomes stronger, superior, to the people. The separation occurs when the government dictates, from a loftier position, what is good and proper for the people,
in spite of any wishes the people desire expressed by vote.
This separation of the people from government is the age old separation practiced by all past authoritarian types of government. Authoritarianism solves the separation anxiety by a bond of supposed trust, of affection and favoring of and for the people by giving them what they need. So separation, in authoritarian systems, is government not attending, as the great administrator, to all the needs of the people. In classical liberalism, the people attend to their own personal needs. And the government attends only to those needs the people assign to it the responsibility to do so.
Smaller warns us against falling for the language that leads to “the large amount of people in our country who feel alienated and disconnected and looking to follow somebody,” yet he overlooks that following "somebody" is not different than following a separate group of somebody's. That is, a group that separates government from the people. As the left does.